


Enamoured of an Ass

by Owl_by_Night



Category: Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Death in Childbirth, Infidelity, M/M, Oberon has a nice ass, also as mentioned in canon, honestly Shakespeare even in your comedies there is misery, inspired by the Bridge Theatre version, nothing which is not already implied in canon, soft bi Oberon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:27:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25054630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owl_by_Night/pseuds/Owl_by_Night
Summary: After midsummer, Bottom realises that Oberon is not the only one to be enamoured of an ass.
Relationships: Bottom/Oberon, Oberon/Titania (Midsummer Night's Dream)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 24





	1. Bottom's Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fengirl88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/gifts).



> Inspired by the Bridge Theatre version where Oberon falls (gloriously) in love with Bottom and also has his (excellent) backside on show on stage. After watching it several times in a state of glee, Fen dared me to write this and call it 'enamoured of an ass'. So this is for Fen, because everyone needs a friend to dare them to break their six month writing hiatus with ridiculous fic about Oberon's bottom.

When he describes it all for Mistress Quince, there are a few details he has to leave out. Obviously. Like the scratching, and the craving for hay. They don’t fit with the _narrative_. He wants her to carry on scribbling it all down, nodding her approval at his ‘vivid descriptions’ and ‘imaginative detail’. He doesn’t want her looking up at him as if she’s wondering if there’s something wrong with him. She’s already had a few words about his flirting with all the fairy servants. About not getting too carried away with being the hero of the piece. 

He’s definitely not telling her about the other aspects of that night (that dream, he tells himself for the hundredth time, just a dream, even if he did wake up with aching muscles and that sore, bruised patch on his collar bone the same size as another man’s mouth). For one, he’s sat through her speech on Consent, Sex and Sexuality once in his life and he’d prefer never to have to do it again. Secondly, he doesn’t want the image of that ass (that perfect, round, squeezable ass, skimmed with soap bubbles or sliding under silk robes) in the same _universe_ as Mistress Quince who has known him since he was eleven, and knows his mother too. He’d never look her in the eye again. 

Because that ass? That ass has been living in his memory as vividly as the day he first saw it and if his imagination came up with such perfection, he’s only sorry he didn’t give it more credit before. He can still remember the feeling of soft, heated skin under his hands, watching those eyes fluttering shut in bliss. He’s not going to lie, it’s given him a lot to reconsider about what he wants from a relationship. He used to think he was a breast man but that’s not what he’s looking for now. 

Sometimes he lies on his bed, wrapped in that inexplicable silk robe (not a dream, not a dream, even if he knows that forests don’t have beds and baths and gorgeous kings who shower him in rose petals and tell him he can sing like an angel). The scent of perfumed flowers is fading fast: he has to press it to his face and breathe deep to catch a wisp of it. Remembers, when he does, the feeling of his face pressed into silk pillows, wandering hands, new pleasures. How perfect it was. It makes him a little crazy, a bit delirious with lust, but somehow he can never quite recreate the same feeling with his own hands, in his own room, hankering after that feeling of being improbably, impossibly loved. 

The scent fades entirely with time. The bruise heals. Mistress Quince puts on a new production based on his dream, although she changes some of the details and he thinks it’s the poorer for it. They don’t get asked to perform it for the Duke, who had for that brief moment looked rather like... no. Don’t even finish that thought. It was a mistake, just a coincidence given the dim light and the rush of performing. 

People stop asking him about midsummer. Athens moves on, you see. Always something new going on. Snug gets a girlfriend. Flute gets a beard. People stop asking Bottom if he’s ok when he falls suddenly silent, remembering. The only thing that remains is his habit of walking to the forest when dusk is turning to true night: loitering under the trees, maybe singing a bit. He says he’s getting in some rehearsal time in privacy, but in truth he’s waiting, waiting for a familiar blond figure under the trees. He’s not given up hoping. Maybe one day, he’s going to see that ass again.


	2. Tell me how it came this night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bottom isn't the only one to be enamoured of Oberon, but for Titania the course of true love has not always run smooth.

**Puck**

Whooo! Well, what a kick up! Over nothing more than a small and squalling mortal. Puck may once have been one of those, although he cannot now remember. All is dim darkness before he met his Queen. Then she was, and so was he, and he lives for her joy and orbits her like an unsteady moon.  
He will serve her and love her in all things, but he loves her most in this current mood. She is sick with jealousy and ripe for mischief. No tears for her. No sleepless nights and lullabies. No host of chattering fairies clustering around her - when things need doing, she turns always and only to _Puck_ and he is there.  
Of course, it’ll all turn out right and boring in the end. Always does. Puck knows it. Titania wants her King as much as he pines for her. So normal, so dull. In the meantime, he plans to enjoy the chaos as long as it lasts…

**Titania**

The problem with Oberon is that he becomes _attached_. Every passing mortal that draws his attention is liable to become the subject of his affections. Sometimes no more than a passing fancy, at other times it becomes a doting infatuation that Titania finds infuriating. He wants them to adore him: to spend long hours talking sweet nothings. He’s _soft_ , soft as summer rain and yielding as new shoots and Titania can’t comprehend why he does not satisfy himself with awed reverence from the mortals who share his bed, as befits a King. As Titania would do herself. 

It is all very well to be temporarily enamoured, as she has been with Theseus in his wilder moments. A soldier with a soldier’s tastes before he had turned to a sober and unyielding statesman. Mortals live such brief, bright and tempting lives: it is difficult not to want, to touch, to possess. In the end, however, the King and Queen should always return to each other, as the honeysuckle twines to tree branches and the bird returns to his own nest. Instead Oberon falls headlong into love and then, inevitably, when he is separated from them by the fickle nature of mortal love (with their strange ideas of matrimony and monogamy) or the inexorable movement of time against the fleeting mortal lifespan, Oberon is filled with grief. Titania needs Oberon to be her match, her equal. She does not want him lost: autumn and sorrowful winter to her spring and joyful summer. 

Oh to hear him speak of the way he’d sat with the woman. Titania can picture it now. The way they had whispered together, how she’d shared with him every change and new curve of her body, thrusting out her belly against the silks of her dresses to exaggerate the burden she carried, and he, puffing out his flat stomach, mimicking her gait to make her laugh. Oberon can never resist a mortal who laughs. The gigglers and jesters, the ones with laughter like ringing bells. He’d have sat for hours with his head pillowed on her lap, her fingers in his hair, spread about with treasures that he only cared for because she brought them. 

Then afterwards.... afterwards he had returned, clutching the infant boy as the shipwrecked cling to a spar. Swearing to keep him more dear than all his fairy kingdom. 

His refusal to yield to Titania’s precedent stings. He has become cold, chiding, refusing every overture. Intending to stay here and bless the bride bed of another of his loves - Hippolyta had been an aberration, more war-like than his usual choice (even when he has fallen for mortal men before they have been more often poets than soldiers). Perhaps it had been retaliation for Theseus. Perhaps Hippolyta had shown a softer, lighter side to him. Certainly he had been more fond of her than Titania had been of the Duke. Two loves Oberon had flaunted at her and then confessed this mortal bond to his changeling: no mere choice of child but fond adoption for love’s sake. 

No wonder Titania wanted to wipe that foolishness from him. No wonder she had been jealous of the changeling boy. The way Oberon shared all his loving sweetness so freely and wept so freely for loss instead of returning to her whole hearted. She had thought to punish him. To open his eyes to his foolish nature when he was in love with anyone but her. 

Such foolishness it led her to in turn. 

It won her the boy, given without thought when Oberon was distracted and conciliatory, but his joy in his hairy love had not given her as much cause for mirth as she had hoped. The very woods had seemed to scold her. 

The release of his enchantment brought him back to her certainly, with his confusion turned to rueful laughter. He danced in her arms at her encouragement, smiled at her, and she had held him close and felt again how well their two bodies fit together. His sweetness all hers once more. Restored to his Kingly looks and garments, attending to what he should and commanding his court to bless the mortal nuptials. She had been happy then. 

Yet even so she had not quite trusted his restoration, worried over his fleeting somber looks, his puzzled questions. After the wedding night had passed, Titania had whisked him to her own bower. She had not wanted him to return to his own bed, to lie on pillows scented with bubble bath and the mortal’s body. She had stripped him of his robe as well, wrapped him in her own green silk. Pinned him like a jewelled butterfly beneath her, hands to hands and mouth to mouth, watched him yield himself up to her. Hoped it would be enough to remove the last of the enchantment from his eyes. 

She should never have trusted that any night’s work involving Puck would go aright. Now she thinks that Oberon sighs. Pines. Looks wistfully at fields of donkeys. Asks to hear the same mortal song again and again as a lullaby. He talks of the ass and his enchantment, of his fine looks and wit and voice. 

Titania tries to turn his thoughts away with new places, new courts, new songs. She even tries to cheer him by returning the changeling boy. Puck brings the child, holding him half upside down and looking wretched at the duty. The mortal is... small. Loud. Damp. Titania cannot see the appeal when they are like this and not yet grown enough to be useful. When first she wanted the child she had seen him only with Oberon’s court, small and solemn eyed, a very pretty page. He has not been so content with her own people. Yet Oberon stretches out his arms unhesitatingly, cradling the boy tightly to him, rocking him, murmuring unfamiliar phrases in the boy’s mother tongue. The boy stops crying almost at once and reaches out a small, brown hand to Oberon’s face which is wet with his own tears. She was mistaken in how much he had loved the child. 

“No, no I shall not leave you again,” he says, kissing the boy’s hand and forehead, “did you think I was lost? I was gone only for a little while. Come, then,” he says, drying his eyes and wiping the boy’s nose on his robe, heedless of the good silk, “tell me everything you’ve seen and done since last I saw you. You have grown, I’m sure.” 

The boy babbles at him and Oberon nods and smiles as seriously as if the words made perfect sense rather than the childish gabble of young mortals. 

“I met a man with asses ears,” Oberon says to him, miming the long shape of them with his hands so the boy giggles. “He sang so very sweetly too and wanted hay to eat, even more than honey.”

Titania listens in unhappy silence. Clearly Oberon has not moved on. Perhaps she should bow gracefully to the inevitable - better to let the affair run its course than wait in uncertainty. 

“My King,” she says when the boy is quiet, occupied with honeycomb and leaving stickiness wherever his hands rest in Titania’s bed, “perhaps we should return to Athens? I hear that Theseus and Hippolyta expect a child. We should go to give them good fortunate.” 

All it takes is a bit of convenient timing. A whisper in the right ears and a few weeks later Oberon, silk clad and leaning negligently on a tree, speaks to woo his beloved but short eared mortal once again. 

“So, do you come here often?”

Titania makes a face like biting into rotten fruit. The changeling child, sitting in her lap and unconcerned about his perch so far above the forest floor, looks up at her and giggles in surprise. He is much improved when he is dry and smiling, much happier now that Oberon has charge of him again and he is more accustomed to Titania’s presence. She would never tell anyone, but she’s getting rather fond of the little mortal. Perhaps she will keep company with him and leave Oberon to his own devices. Surely in time, he will return to her again.


	3. With thine own fool’s eyes peep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bottom has had a wonderful night. It's a shame about the morning after...

**Bottom**

All things considered this must be one of the best awakenings in his life. Bottom wakes on the softest of soft beds. The kind of bed he has only slept on once before. Oh. Oh yes, exactly that soft bed and not alone this time. That ass is pressed snugly up against him in all its tempting glory. 

If this is a dream he never wants to wake. The King of the Fairies (call me Oberon, darling, smiling wickedly as he’d crawled his way downwards...) is still sleeping beside him. The flowery scent that Bottom had once pined for is heavy in his nose, strongest at the nape of Oberon’s neck where his pale hair curls against the skin. Bottom thinks, for a moment, that this is going to make an excellently poetical sequel for Mistress Quince, and then banishes that thought as quickly as he can. He has another kind of sequel in mind. One that can be written as simply as moving his hand downwards, beneath the sheets.

Later (a long, glorious, wrung out in every way, sticky but _perfect_ later) he wakes again. No ass this time, but a jumble of twining limbs and silks within the circle of his arms. The face that looks so arrogant and innocent by different lights. Not perhaps so dazedly loving in expression as it had been that previous summer night, but a face that had looked at him with intent and experience… a face that he is not alone in considering....

Bottom freezes, meeting the eyes of the most beautiful and downright terrifying woman he has ever met. He has the impression of long hair, green silk and a crowd of people about her and he clutches instinctively for the sheets to make sure his dignity is intact. 

“Arise, my lord,” the woman says, and clearly not to him. Her voice is sharp and she frowns at Bottom, who withdraws his arms from Oberon’s person and tries to flatten himself unobtrusively into the mattress. He is no fool and this is obviously some marital dispute he’s wandered into. Possibly a dispute outside the mortal realm as well because if the man beside him is the Fairy King that makes her... 

“Mmm... Titania?” Oberon mumbles and stirs, blinking sleepily. Titania scowls at him when he looks up and reaches for her. He withdraws his hand, looking hurt. 

“It is past noon, my King,” she says severely. “The child is hungry.”

Not what Bottom was expecting her to say. He was expecting something about _himself_ because although this is his first time in this predicament, he’s assuming that most people don’t find their husband in bed with someone else and comment first about his lie in.

Oberon pulls himself upright, rubbing his eyes and nearly dislodging the sheet from where it covers Bottom’s dignity. “I was otherwise occupied, as well you knew!” He turns to look at Bottom with a smirk and lets go of the sheet. Apparently he has not a shred of modesty and no qualms about showing the marks on his skin to the entire fairy court. Bottom tries hard not to respond to a level of smugness that should not be attractive and definitely shouldn’t be rewarded either. He loses. 

“Surely you could have managed to feed one small mortal on your own?” Oberon says, turning away with one last enticing grin at Bottom. “Or asked Puck?”

“It is _your_ child.”

Bottom can’t help it. Just for a second he looks down at Oberon’s stomach, remembers a few details from last night and wonders if he ought to be worried about fatherhood because he’s getting a sense that fairies do things _very_ differently and that’s one hell of a worry. (Not that he’d say a definite ‘no’ to that option one day but it’s too soon for that kind of commitment. He has a career to think of and he’s always wanted to be an involved father like his own has been and… and his thoughts are spiralling way out of control.) Oberon catches him looking. 

“Not like that,” he says, eye-roll heavily implied, and tugs on his dressing gown to cover himself. Oh. Maybe not so different for fairies after all. Bottom feels a slight relief, even as he is conscious that he’s still in bed, very naked and far too caught up in whatever this is to relax just yet.

“Where is the boy?” Oberon asks, rather imperiously. In answer, a youth approaches, dressed in strange, patched garments and holding a kid at arms length. The child is red faced and kicking; half way to a temper tantrum if Bottom is any judge (he has enough siblings to know these things). 

“Hello,” Oberon says in a very different tone, plucking the boy from the outstretched hands and swinging him up into his arms. “Have you been upsetting Puck, hmm?” 

Puck sighs audibly with relief when his burden is taken from him. Bottom thinks he looks familiar... as if he’d seen him once before. Maybe in a bit part role for Mistress Quince. The memory is very foggy. 

Oberon appears surprisingly competent with a child. He has managed to get up and tie the dressing gown without putting the boy down and stalled any threatened yelling. “Now then,” he says, “did you not have your breakfast?”

“If you wish to keep the boy my lord, you should not dally with other mortals. I am not his guardian.” Titania does not sound happy. 

Oberon stiffens, expression turned abruptly cold. “And yet once upon a time, Titania, you had me believe you wished it more than any price. Certainly you have gone to marvellous strange lengths to seek his guardianship. Cobweb, come, take the boy, find him food. My Queen and I have matters to discuss.” 

He kisses the boy’s forehead but it is an absent gesture and the child goes still and quiet as he is handed over, burrowing his face into Cobweb’s neck. The rest of their audience melts away quickly on all sides until Bottom finds himself alone with the King and Queen and nothing but a sheet to his name. His clothes were lost some time early last evening and haven’t been seen since. He tries to shuffle unobtrusively to the edge of the bed, taking the sheet with him. He manages it only because the King and Queen have eyes for none but each other, gazes locked in some unspoken war. 

“So, proud Titania, why came you here unless to scold me for some fancied neglect? I knew your hand in last night’s work. Or should I say, the hand of Puck?” 

“Should I not remind you of your duty, when you fail in its observances?”

“Fail! One evening’s joy, such as you, I am sure, have _never_ observed. Is this now failure?”

Bottom decides that this is his moment to take his sheet and make a run for it. He’s never wanted to get mixed up with an affair and he isn’t going to start now. He stops only when Oberon mentions him by name. 

“…told me his friends were all delayed. Was not that Puck? Was not that your work?”

Oh. Well that would explain why he’d sat all evening in the tavern, wondering why nobody came even though they’d promised faithfully to be there when rehearsals ended. Otherwise he would never have gone walking to the woods last night… The level of interference in his life is really quite disturbing. He dithers, wondering if he ought to stay and find out what’s going on. Titania is speaking again, her voice high pitched with anger. 

“You were going to grieve over him like you did over all your lost loves. I thought if you saw him again and realised it was nothing it would be an end to your folly!”

“Folly, is it? Folly to grieve for a lost love! I suppose you would prefer I were like your military mortals. All your soldiers: so quick to love and quick to kill and never feeling any loss so deep as I. I suppose you would prefer me be a stoic. Should you love me more if I felt less?”

“No! I did not love them as you love the mortals who share your bed. They were distractions, comfort when you would have none of my company. They did not mean more to me than you!” 

“Did you think that because I grieve the loss of love I must give something more of myself than you? Cold hearted Titania! Are you so incapable of loving more than once?” 

“You know not what I feel! Nor can you say your love of me is greater - you scorned me for love of some mortal woman. Put her child at higher price than my request.”

“Still jealous of the mortal child? If you cared for my company, why give me further cause to leave your bed? Why enchant this Athenian youth?”

“Why love that woman? What did she offer you, that I did not?”

They are very close to each other, and the air is as heavy as the advent of a storm. Bottom should really leave. He should. It’s not his place to interfere. Except he never can resist giving advice when people are being stupid about something. He clears his throat. 

“You know…” he says, “you two really need a conversation about boundaries.”

They swing to look at him and he holds up his hands placatingly, remembering with a sinking feeling that he’s speaking to immortal beings with the power to inflict any kind of enchantment if they don’t care for his advice.

“What do I know, eh?” He laughs. Laughter is always good at diffusing the awkward. He uses it with Snug a lot. “It’s just, you know, it feels like the problem here is that you’ve not really set out the boundaries in your relationship.” He gestures, encompassing the two of them, the bed, himself. Two sets of unblinking, immortal eyes, survey him with as much confusion as if a passing mouse had spoken to them. Probably, in their world, a mouse would be less surprising. He’s relieved when they turn their attention back to each other. 

“Boundaries,” Titania says, rolling the word around her mouth as if savouring some new flavour. 

“Magic flowers are off limits,” Oberon says quickly. “Non-negotiable.”

Titania bares her teeth and Bottom wonders what that’s all about. “And what shall I call off limits my lord,” she says, “when I am given orders by the mortal who shares your bed? Under his influence you have given away a boy that once you valued more than your fairy kingdom. More than your love for me. What more would you give now at his suggestion?”

“You dare!”

There are moments in life when you look at someone you knew and see them with entirely new eyes. So Bottom sees Oberon now: head back, eyes widening in challenge like a snake about to strike. If he had thought him cold before it was but an autumn chill compared to this. Gone the tender hearted man who drew him into bed. In place the King, icy with anger, regal in bearing. Oh this is not good…

The wind is rising, tugging at the sheet around his waist. He can feel the world around him in the same way he did at midsummer, seeing and hearing things that no mortal senses can perceive and the two of them at the heart of it all, sending everything out of balance in their argument. They could, he thinks, unravel every human thing like a dropped spindle untwisting thread as it falls. And he, no more than a single strand of wool. The world seems poised, waiting.

They do say that fools go where even fairies fear to tread. 

“So I’m sensing there’s a lot of unresolved feelings here…” 

Didn’t Mistress Quince tell him he would get himself in trouble one day? The focus of two immortal beings makes his knees shake. They have turned to him though and some of that unearthly feeling is lessened: he has their attention and had better go on. He pulls the sheet a little tighter around his waist, wishes for his clothes, and says, “So... correct me if I’m wrong but it sounds like you two have this long term relationship going on... of course you do... immortal fairies, King and Queen, oh by the gods… never mind, so um... you’ve both had a few affairs?” 

Great question Bottom. Great question to ask when you’re still wrapped in a sheet that smells like flowers and sex and the man you spent the night with is standing right there, dishevelled in his dressing gown. 

Somehow, impossibly, as if by a very human miracle, Titania nods. A brief little duck of her head and a sideways glance at Oberon. Snug looks like that at her girlfriend sometimes, when she wants to hold hands but doesn’t want to be the one to initiate it. Thinking of it that way is a bit easier somehow. This is the kind of conversation he’d have down the pub, dispensing advice over a pint. He can breathe again now. The breeze, if ever there was one, has died away and the two of them look quite different again. Different, but yet he cannot quite remember how they looked before: the impression of their faces is as a faded memory. Instead they seem as any other couple he’s seen, caught in the habit of some old argument. 

“So you’ve been seeing other people but you both love each other?” Again he waits for confirmation. It ought to hurt, watching that yearning expression pass fleetingly over Oberon’s face and directed at Titania, but there’s a shifting feeling in the air that sings of love so long and deep it passes all mortal comprehension. That’s not the sort of thing Bottom expects to compete with. He also suspects (or maybe hopes) that Oberon’s heart is big enough to make room for a mortal ass who loves him too. 

Bottom presses his advantage. “If you still love each other, but you’re making each other miserable you probably need to talk it through. Say what the boundaries are, you know. At least that’s what Mistress Quince says.”

“I have a strong desire to meet this Mistress Quince,” says Oberon. “Titania, my Queen…”

He offers a hand to her and though she does not take it, she does not respond with anger. “Oberon,” she says, in a voice so soft in tone and loud in meaning that if Bottom could recreate it, he would have a whole audience captive in the palm of his hand. 

It is not the moment for thinking theatrically. Bottom sneaks off. It seems the opportune time and he doesn’t fancy hearing them discussing whether he is on the right or wrong side of one of their boundaries. (Is it wrong to hope he’s on the side with Oberon’s ass?)

He shouldn’t, but he swaggers just a little as he walks away. After all, how many men can say that they’ve spent the night with a Fairy King who controls the elements? Then mediated an argument between warring royalty the morning after? This is a heroic piece indeed. Perhaps if Mistress Quince wrote it, he could sing, and have the sound of his singing bring an end to the argument? It is more fitting than the clumsy words that were really nothing more than improv. 

His aimless wander takes him through the wood until he finds Puck fishing in a stream with his toes. The boy (who really needs a name, Bottom thinks) is splashing about in the shallows. He burbles something, smacking the water with an open hand. Puck, caught in the splash, gives a full body twitch in the manner of a damp cat. For lack of better options, Bottom takes a seat. 

**Puck**

The stupid mortal is still here. If Puck were in his place he’d have been gone long since and if he shows signs of lingering later still, Puck might be tempted to give him those ears back, just to teach him sense. Although if Puck himself had more sense he wouldn’t have stayed around long enough to be caught by Cobweb and be given babysitting duty again. 

He’s doing it. Like always. Mortal child alive, not screaming. Good for Puck. 

The ass is making conversation. “Hello little man,” he says, sitting in his sheet on the bank of the stream. The kid looks at him suspiciously. “You like the water then?” He ripples his fingers in the stream. “Oh! It’s warmer than I thought!”

Puck shrugs. He’s only doing what he’s told. Moth told him not to let the changeling freeze and a bit of warm water isn’t hard. Nobody should read anything into it. He still doesn’t like babysitting. Titania would never have asked it of him.

The mortal starts playing games. Little splashes and hand claps. Silly rhymes. The changeling laughs and splashes back. Puck retreats further away - he’ll have no part in this. Mortals have the strangest ideas about what makes good fun. 

“You need more friends to play with, don’t you little man?” 

“‘Puh! Puh!,” says the changeling.

“You’re friends with Puck?” Honestly, it’s like they just put words in the kid’s mouth. The mortal and Oberon both. 

“No we’re not.” Puck says. The changeling looks at him, holding out small hands appealingly. Ugh. 

“It’s a shame,” the mortal says, “I used to have lots of fun when my brothers were this small. We used to get up to all kinds of mischief.”

The changeling giggles. “Is-chief,” he says, and kicks up an almighty spray of water in the other mortal’s face. Bottom splutters and coughs, tripping on his wet sheet as he tries to get away. The changeling shrieks with laughter, splashing him again and again as he tries to rise. 

Fair enough kid. Fair enough. Perhaps _small_ mortals can be fun. Puck takes his opportunities where he can.

He makes the next splash of water turn abruptly cold.


	4. How shall we find the concord of this discord?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oberon and Titania need to have a talk. One they probably should have had at midsummer.

**Titania**

She had gone to Oberon’s bed intending to shame him. A night of wakefulness and brooding had led to a morning of bad temper, not helped by the changeling child having an attack of bad temper. She had thought to see Oberon tousle haired and sheepish with the dawn, realising he was mistaken in the mortal after all, but hours had passed since sunrise and he had not emerged. Instead she found him sleeping, wrapped contentedly in the arms of his Athenian swain. She could have wept. Anger came more easily: she could taste the potential for it like an adder tastes the air with flickering tongue. 

When he woke his concern was all for the boy. Of course. Her gentle king, all care. She had wanted to provoke him, force him to show himself in regal anger. She could at least have that, to show he was still the King to her Queen. Then she regretted it when he showed that face. How pitiful that they should come to this, that a mortal should lecture them on love? 

The anger fades. She has not the strength to keep it burning now. 

The moment the mortal leaves, Titania folds herself down onto the bank as a small fairy might fold themselves inside a flower to hide, as if by will she could make herself small enough to creep within an acorn shell. It is not a posture she would adopt if any were in sight. She thinks that perhaps Oberon might take the hint and give her privacy. 

It is silent a while. Every creature crept away. Even the winds have stilled and stir the trees no longer. She wonders if she is alone but does not lift her head to see. She is not certain whether she would prefer the solitude or that he stay. 

Oberon sits beside her then. Not touching, but as close as he can without. She does not look at him, but knows his presence even when he moves silently. If she peeps above her knees, she can see his bare feet wriggle against the grass. It is his habit when he is thinking what to say. She thinks, perhaps, that once in the now long distant past, they had met each other and danced for the first time and she had looked down at his feet in shyness and he had raised her face to his… but that is many summers gone and she can scarce remember it, if it is even true memory. 

“After midsummer,” he says quietly, “I should have asked you why. I thought perhaps… that it had been one of your wild moments, because you wanted the boy. Then you returned him and still… I did not ask you.”

Titania keeps her head buried in her knees. 

“I should have asked, shouldn’t I?” His hand rests on her shoulder, thumb stroking over the skin of her neck. It is an old, familiar gesture. “It was more than that. You were punishing me, because I had done you injury, and I did not ask you to tell me what injury I had done. Will you tell me, if I ask now?”

“I wanted to…” Even as she looks at him, she does not have words. “I thought…. feared…” Why is it so hard to find the right words? “It is a very mortal wish, to raise a child.” 

Oberon looks at her, unsure. “Perhaps,” he says, “but I am not mortal nor will I become so for the sake of one boy.”

“Still you wanted to raise him, loved him, called him your joy…”

“As you have done with Puck!” That is another old argument. Oberon disapproves of her mischief loving sprite, prizes loving loyalty in his servants. 

“That’s different.” 

“How different? You have his trust, his love, you keep him in your confidence. And he is fairy kind. Why should I not have my young squire to live with me?” Oberon plucks a flower from the grass and turns it in his fingers until the stem bruises dark with sap. He tugs at the small white petals, letting them fall as he speaks. “His childhood will be but fleeting, scarce more than a season to our eyes. He may choose the world of men when he is grown and his life will be as short as any man’s. It is the grief that I have known since first I held him in my arms, knowing his mother’s eyes were on me and that just as I was losing her before her allotted time, so would I one day lose him too.”

“You were with her then?” It is unusual, even with their mortal loves, to have so close a view of their mortality. Titania has seen all manner of lives and deaths, from mayfly to man, in war and hunting, but only where life had changed to death within a heartbeat (and she had not watched through choice). Hard enough to lose a love in battle, swift and painful as a blade. No fairy would choose to sit at a deathbed, to watch that incomprehensible stretch of last minutes into absence. She could not do it. 

“She was afraid…” The sorrow in his voice makes her look at him again. Oberon runs his hands over his face. Perhaps he, too, had been afraid. Yet he had stayed and taken the hurt. His vulnerability makes her bold. 

“As was I. Afraid of losing you, of having lost you to another’s love, hers or her boy’s, which feels to my heart as close to death as I might come.” 

“Then I have injured you indeed and I am sorry for it. I mistook. I hoped that if I shared my grief that you might comfort me, weep with me, sorrow for my sake as I would have for thy sorrow in turn.” He would, she knows. 

His hand rests in his lap and Titania runs her fingers over it, tracing the patterns of knuckles and veins. “I would have comforted you but you would have none of my comfort! You would not smile for my sake, you would not be cheered, no trifle could I offer you. What should I have done?”

“I did not ask for trinkets and words and distractions - I wanted you and you alone. To have you understand. I did not ask for a cure for grief, but someone to care that I felt it.” He looks at her with such openness that Titania hides her face again for sorrow. Is a thousand years not time enough to mend these misunderstandings? How can mortals navigate such complexities in so short a time as they have on earth? 

“I feared that I had lost you too,” Oberon says. “You would not speak to me. You told me you had forsaken my bed and company both. I thought you wished the child, but then returned him to me. I thought perhaps it had been only to hurt me, or make a fool of me. I spent so many hours trying to understand why that man, that mortal… and those ears!” 

When Titania looks at him, Oberon pulls a very comical face. He lifts his hands above his head and flaps them, raising one eyebrow. She had missed him trying to make her laugh. 

“In truth,” she says, “he was just there. Puck enchanted him.”

“I should have known that Puck would be involved. This foolishness does have his stamp. I shall not look for future virtues to explain your choice, although I wondered why you pushed me back into his company again. I let you do it for curiosity’s sake.”

“For jealousy, my lord. I thought I had lost you to him again through my folly.”

He laughs. “Folly indeed, although... he is a pretty youth. Do you not agree?”

“Perhaps…” Titania smiles at him. It has been many years past since they have been enamoured of the same mortal but the memories are very sweet. “Still, I think he is not ready to hear me speak of his virtues. Will you seek him out again?”

“That, my love, depends on you. And his view of the matter. I’ll not mislead him,” he says, “he must know that you are first in my affections and decide accordingly.” 

“Is it… is it a mortal kind of wish to be first, only, in your affections? I could not bear to think you loved a mortal most. I thought there was some virtue in that woman that I could not match.”

“Oh my love, my Queen...” he runs a hand so gently over her cheek. “My own.”

“Oberon...”

“Could you still doubt me? I, who have loved you so well? I who would have had you first in all things.”

“Even with your mortal loves?”

“Even then, for none of them have I loved as well as I love you. My love for them is nothing more than a sudden storm and you, my love, my safe haven when the tempest’s past.”

“I have been a jealous fool.”

“Perhaps, my love,” he smiles at her sweetly, tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, “but are we not all fools?” At midsummer I lay awake at night and the sweetest lullaby brought me no rest. I wanted you to come to me, for us to repair the wrongs we had done each other. Had you been but half an hour before your time you would have found me wakeful and desiring nothing more than to reconcile with thee.”

“I wish I could undo that night.” 

“Better not, for then I would not have met the Athenian youth who was so wise as to suggest that we should talk. I hope that many ills have been averted by following his advice. Perhaps no lovers are too old for new beginnings.”

He leans forward and kisses her, sweet and chaste. So might wedding vows be sealed. The deepest promise with the lightest kiss. 

“We will remember this,” she says, “remember what hurt and what mended it. Let me be first in your love and you in mine.”

“So it is, and so it will be, fair Titania.” He opens his arms to her and she goes, holding him as tight and close as breath allows. 

“What would you have us do now?” she says, breathless with a kiss of far less chastity. 

“Love me,” he says, “and share with me everything that brings joy or grief. Love any mortal you choose but love me most. Help me raise my boy and be his guardian, dance with me in our rounds and rule our courts by my side…”

“No,” she says, stopping his words with a finger on his lips, “I mean, what would you now, while we are so fortunately alone and newly reconciled?” 

Oberon looks up at her with wonder and desire writ plain across his face. He falls backwards with an idle grace, sprawling on the mossy bank with arms outstretched. “You are my Queen, my love, and I am yours… do what thou wilt.” 

**Bottom**

Bottom has passed a rather pleasant day with Puck and the changeling child (at least once he’d found dry clothes). It’s a shame he hasn’t seen Cobweb and Mustardseed and the others. Perhaps they are busy elsewhere. Oberon, too, has been absent but nobody has suggested to Bottom that he leave and although he napped under the afternoon sun, basking in the dappled shade and bright green of sun through leaves, when he woke he was still within the fairy kingdom, the changeling child using him as a pillow. 

As evening begins to draw in, with dusky shadows creeping in from all sides and a fresh scent of greenery filling the air, Oberon returns. No flowing silks this time: he is robed like a king in jewels and velvets, garlanded with flowers. He looks serious and Bottom knows, in his heart, what will be said. A mortal man may love a king, but there are limits to it. 

“Walk with me,” Oberon says, taking him by the arm. His feet are bare but seem to feel no pain from stones or twigs or brambles. Nothing dares to catch at his fine coat. Bottom feels a little clumsy in comparison.

“I have to thank you,” Oberon says when they are standing together, overlooking the river where it broadens and begins to flow more swiftly and the sunlight comes slanting through the lofty trees, “you are wise for a mortal. As wise as you are beautiful I think I once said.”

Bottom disclaims it. 

“It is true, even if you have not grown to have confidence in it yet. You will. Mortal man must grow and change: it is the blessing and curse of your mortal state. And I have loved you both through bewitchment and for your own sake...”

Bottom swallows hard. He doesn’t want to hear what must come after it. Not now. Not with Oberon within his grasp and with his scent of flowers clinging about them both. He doesn’t want to see that face twist into sorrow or sympathy. He speaks, because he must. 

“Babe, you know, I’ve got my career to think of.”

Oberon stops. He looks at Bottom. Raises one eyebrow. 

“I mean, it’s been amazing... totally amazing yeah... but you travel a lot don’t you, all over the world? Have all sorts of kingly duties to fulfil?”

“I... yes...” The confused expression on Oberon’s face is rather endearing. Perhaps this isn’t how these conversations usually go. So much the better for it. Bottom would prefer to be a lasting memory for his difference. 

“I can’t do that right now babe. I’ve got plays coming up. New roles you know. Mistress Quince has promised to write me a worthy monologue and a part in our summer production. It takes time when you have a reputation to build.”

“Ah... yes, of course.” Oberon still looks rather disconcerted. 

“I mean, if I was free and... not mortal, that would be different...”

“Of course! So... we’re...” Oberon makes a little wiggle with his hand between them. Bottom has no idea what it’s meant to mean so tries his preferred interpretation. 

“Friends?”

“Of course.” Oberon looks so earnest now that Bottom wants to kiss away that little furrow on his brow, or kiss his lips and distract him. He really can’t help himself. If he doesn’t ask, he’ll never get. 

“So, do you think there might be any benefits time go with that friendship?” He hates that his voice wobbles, just a bit, when he speaks. 

“Definitely negotiable, darling,” Oberon says with so wicked an expression that Bottom’s heart thumps in his chest. “If I’m passing this way.” Oberon leans forward and runs his finger down the side of Bottom’s face, following it with a kiss pressed to Bottom’s forehead. Bottom can’t breathe for a moment (feels all the weight of the vast forest around them pressing on him and the sudden disorientation of seeing and sensing the world as no mortal should) but then Oberon steps back a little and the world adjusts. The woods are lighter and less gloomy. The pain he’d felt before about the inevitable parting seems lessened. 

“And she knows?” It matters to Bottom. He can’t plead ignorance any more, and neither self preservation nor pride would allow him to be a secret from Titania. 

“Yes. I promise I would do nothing without her blessing. She is and always will be my Queen. You can decide if that is... acceptable for you. I will not press you for an answer now.” Oberon takes Bottom’s hand in his own and squeezes it. “Tonight we shall have revelling within my court. Will you go with me, to see our dancing ere we part?” 

“I’d love to. If... if I can make one request?” 

“Of course.” 

“Well last time I met you, I had the story of my night to tell. Mistress Quince wrote a monologue for it and it has been very well received.” Bottom preens a little. Oberon makes appreciative noises. “So... I was wondering if you had any other good tales you might share with me.”

“Oh... yes, I think that could be arranged.”

“And when you say dancing?”

“Yes?”

“Do you mean with me?”


	5. The King doth keep his revels here tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dancing and stories, just as Oberon promised.

**Puck**

Oberon really shouldn’t dance. Really. He’s going to have someone’s eye out. Or cause a heart attack, if such a thing were possible for a fairy. An elf might faint of course. They are small and over excitable. 

Still, it gives Puck the chance to dance with his Queen again. He has to stretch right up to do it but he’s not ashamed of the difference in height. They look no stranger than Oberon dancing with Peaseblossom. Even the mortal looks rather short in comparison to the King and Queen. 

“Gentle Puck,” Titania calls him. She bends down to his height and spins him in circles. Sways him back and forth like a willow tree in a breeze and he her branches. Too sedate for his liking, but he can fix the music later. Make it a proper party. 

“Distract the mortal for me, good Puck,” she says when their dance ends. It’s not difficult to see why. The man is dancing slow circles in the arms of the fairy king, one hand on Oberon’s bum. He’s got moves (Puck will grant him that). He can make Oberon laugh too, face creasing with laughter over whatever Bottom is telling him. 

Titania is very graceful about cutting in, dancing with both of them while Bottom looks terrified. A dance of three partners isn’t easy to dance, but Puck suspects that’s not what has him ducking his head in shyness. He looks relieved when Titania turns to Oberon, linking their hands and shifting to the formal patterns that have marked their rites since first they were danced. Then Oberon twirls her round, gets his hands on her hips in a rather different kind of dancing. (Puck doesn’t want to think any more about that. If he’d had parents, Titania and Oberon would be closest to how he’d think about them and some thoughts are right out). 

The mortal looks a little lost without anyone to dance with, shifting from foot to foot at the edge of the crowd. Even with flowers in his hair and a borrowed shirt, he is so obviously not of their kind and unknown. Fairies shy away from him. Time for Puck to do his magic then. He picks up the Changeling and drapes him over one shoulder for safekeeping. Distract one mortal, improve the music. Simple. 

**Oberon**  
In the last, dark hours of the night, the revels of the fairy court are almost ended. There has been feasting of a sort that would not disgrace Duke Theseus’ table. Music and dancing, all with all. Oberon has danced with his Queen, with his mortal, with Peaseblossom and Moth together, with his small changeling boy and even, rather memorably, with Puck. 

Now he sits quietly about the flickering fire, lit for the sake of mortal comfort and smouldering down to embers as the night draws closer to dawn. A time for story telling as he promised. Round they go with their tales while Nick Bottom sprawls at his side, listening carefully to every one. He laughs often, and Oberon is glad: glad that of all the mortals within the woods that night, it should have been this one that woke him. Gentle and full of laughter and, without an asses ears, very beautiful to look upon. Even when the fairy court departs this place, Oberon will remember these nights with fondness. 

Puck has the funniest tales to tell, enough to make his audience weep for laughter. He crows with triumph and Titania praises him. Oberon finds himself in a more forgiving mood towards him. All is well there. The stories continue for a long time. The rest of the court have many tales of their own - dances and duels and revelling. Titania has tales of battles, warriors, impossible tasks and hard earned glory. They are not tales that Oberon would tell, but he listens and feels the lure of mortal triumph for her sake. 

The changeling boy has crept into his lap some time since, eating the nuts that Oberon shells for him and playing with the beads around Oberon’s neck. Now he whispers to him, asking for a story of his own. Oberon looks to Titania but she nods at him encouragingly and tells him, loud enough for the assembled court to hear, to share the story of the boy’s mother. So he begins. 

He begins with their meeting on the shore, her beauty, her joy, her laughter… and her love for her yet unborn son. He talks of how she had loved jokes and pretty things, sweetmeats and fresh flowers. How dark the fall of her long hair, how bright the wicked mischief in her eyes. How she had sewn her own delicate embroideries on the finest silk for her child and talked of his future. In Oberon’s lap, her son wriggles himself into a comfortable position and listens raptly. He is too young to follow the tale but he knows and loves the sound of Oberon’s voice. He will have no memories of his mother, only these fairy visions that Oberon can conjure. 

When the tale comes to the time of her death Oberon chokes upon the words but Titania, his beautiful Titania, winds her arms around him and finishes the tale for him.

“Your mother died to bring you life,” she says to the boy when the tale is done, “but she entrusted you to my King, knowing that he would love you and raise you and teach you how well she loved you too. So that now you belong to us and shall live here as long as you choose.” She smoothes his hair, replacing one of the flowers that has come adrift: roses that Oberon had placed there, free of thorns. 

The boy looks at her and clutches trustingly at her hand, confident in being welcome. She taps him on the nose to make him smile. When Oberon turns his tear streaked face to Titania she does the same to him before she wipes the tears away with gentle fingers.

“Another tale,” she says, turning to speak to the court in general, “and perhaps one more joyful.”

“I have a tale worth telling, mistress.”

It is Bottom, hand raised like a schoolboy at his lessons. 

“Then tell it,” Titania says, “we shall enjoy hearing a tale that does not come from our fairy kingdom.” 

She nods graciously and Bottom stands, clearing his throat, launching into a surprisingly sweet hearted story about a fierce lioness enamoured of a lady. When he relaxes into his tale and overcomes his youthful tendency to melodrama, he has a natural skill. Truly he is an extraordinary mortal to be so bold in such company and would well grace their court in future. Oberon hopes that he will do so again. 

It is an absorbing tale that he tells. Oberon listens, laughs, and feels every joy of sitting thus comforted with his beloved child now slumbering in his arms. Behind him, Titania still rests her head on his shoulder. He can feel the warmth of her body against him, warmer than the embers’ glow. She smells of thyme and irises. He wants her still, but quietly, a banked fire waiting the proper moment to blaze up anew. For now he is most aware of his own tiredness after the release of a great argument and upheaval and reunion, a night of passion and a future parting. 

Perhaps he even dozes a little in the circle of her arms, rousing when Cobweb comes to take the small mortal and bear him off to bed. Oberon kisses the boy’s forehead, sweet with the scent of roses, but he does not wake. Bottom is sleeping too, ringed with wild flowers, snoring gently. Better that he sleeps soundly and wakes with dawn than with parting. Oberon covers him with a blanket and rests his hand upon his chest for a moment, feeling the pulse of a mortal heart beat beneath his palm. 

“To bed, my lord,” Titania says as he rises, “my love.” She takes his hand and leads him with her. He is so very tired, but she does not let him stumble. 

They lie together in her bed, entwined as close as two beings can be, body to body and breath to breath. Her arms are wound about him and his head rests upon her shoulder. He is too tired to do more than kiss her. He remembers, briefly, that night when they had quarrelled and he had been left sleepless, tossing and turning and wanting so much to go to her and make amends without knowing how. He burrows his head into the crook of her neck to know that she is really here. 

“My love, my love...” she whispers to him, and with the sweet sound in his ear and all well with the world, he sleeps.


	6. And all is mended

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bottom has a dream.

**Bottom**

Bottom has had _such_ a dream.

No. It was not a dream, but reality. He walks back to Athens in the cool morning air, his head still wound about with flowers. Roses and herbs and sweet smelling blooms he cannot name. He will wear them when he goes to Mistress Quince, to tell her of the things he has heard, has seen... and nothing _at all_ of what he has done. 

What good cheer it has given him, to have seen that ass again and spent such a night and in such company. To have the promise that he might see Oberon again. To have a mind filled up with tales to make many an audience laugh and to have his ears ringing with fairy songs. For Bottom, Nick Bottom, to have made a Queen smile at him, after such an inauspicious beginning. It has been a heroic day. 

To think he had once desired no more than sixpence for playing Pyramus. When he has a performance written based on last night, it must surely be a role that was made for the payment of eight pence. A lover of Kings must be worth eight pence. (He wonders, sadly, if the audience in Athens is ready for one such as himself to be a lover of Kings, or if he must resign himself to see his role a lover of Queens instead. Hippolyta’s influence has mellowed Athenian society but some of Theseus’ old severity still lingers. Mistress Quince may insist upon the change even if the thought of himself with Titania fills him with terror and a great relief that she did not turn him into a frog for his interference). 

Still, nothing can mar his enjoyment of this morning. He sings a little as he walks. It is a song of Moth’s devising and is a pretty refrain. Perhaps, when Theseus’ child is born, they will summon players to the palace and Bottom will perform for him once more. The song is good and he has heard tales enough that would be fitting for the celebration of a birth. 

Bottom does harbour some lingering concerns about the Duke. That uncanny resemblance still troubles him and Oberon had not been comforting. He had said something about ‘originals’ and dukes more often needing to learn kindness than kingliness and that it was a thing past mortal understanding. (Bottom hopes, devoutly hopes, that whatever Theseus may or may not have learned from Oberon, he has not learned what Bottom looks like without his clothes.) Perhaps if they perform for the Duke, they will need to pick their play most carefully. 

To Mistress Quince first then, while his thoughts are still foremost in his mind. After that, a good luncheon and a long sleep. Time, he thinks, passes very strangely in the fairy kingdom but he has been awake for the better part of two nights. He will lie in his own bed, in the silk shirt that even now is hidden beneath his clothes, still carrying the scent of Oberon. A gift, Oberon had said: fastening the small pearl buttons with fingers as nimble as a page, as if her were not a King. It is the finest garment that Bottom has ever worn or touched. As a weaver he knows fabric and can feel the skill in this. He could not hope to make such a thing, so soft and finely woven, so handsomely stitched. If it were sold it would pay a year’s wages and more, but while he may study it, hope to learn some technique from its construction, he will not part with Oberon’s gift. 

“Keep it,” Oberon had said, “to wear when we have the chance to meet again, and until then, to think of me.” He had run his fingers gently over silken fabric, and kissed Bottom so long and sweetly that he had been breathless. It is a heady thing, to kiss as Oberon kisses, like drunkenness without wine. How vividly the impression of it remains. How sharp the ache of longing if he thinks of it. The flowery scent that plagued his dreams after midsummer is still with him now, comfort and torment both. A reminder of what he had, of what he has lost, and what he hopes to have again. 

Perhaps, if he is very fortunate, the fairy court will have returned before the last of the scent is entirely faded, and Bottom will have another night to look forward to. He is a young man, and he can dream.


End file.
